THE SV RATIO IN THERMODYNAMIC PROCESSES

Abstract

Thermodynamic processes take special place not just in the physical approach to understanding nature, but in almost every single natural science, and also humanistic ones. The speed of establishing balanced state in a certain thermodynamic system is proportional to ratio between area and volume of its interior bodies. Scaling laws play an important role in analyzing influence of the ratio between bodies' area and volume in thermodynamic systems. In general, scaling laws explore dependency of a certain physical quantity on dimensions' changes. In this work, Galileo's "Two new sciences" is mentioned, in which the geometrical and material enlargements of a body are compared. His mathematical cradle experiments-initiated formulation of scaling laws (so have Kepler's analysis of planets' kinematics and Newtown's description of gravitational interaction done). In the upcoming text, the simplest scaling law is explained-the law of dependency of S/V ratio on a change of body's dimensions. It also includes description of an influence the ratio has on the speed of establishing thermal equilibrium. Cooling and warming processes are described, as well as matching dependencies of their speed on body's area and volume. Considering that there are warm-blooded organisms in organic world, that is, organisms whose temperature does not depend on the temperature of their environment, the description of the model suitable for exploring that phenomenon is given. To be more precise, as energy is being generated on cell level, or, in every part of the organism, heating of the body via microwave and infrared emission is modelled. Comparisons of these two ways of heating are made, followed by dependency of establishing thermal equilibrium on body's dimensions. At the end, it is pointed out how important exploring of the scaling laws is, since they haven't been given a special place in natural science courses, and, generally speaking, belong to many sciences and science disciplines. It is being predicted that scaling laws are going to be explored more intensively, especially having the miniaturization of many devices and creating robots of sub-cell dimensions in mind.